Balázs Eszter: Art in action. Lajos Kassák's Avant-Garde Journals from A Tett to Dokumentum, 1915-1927 - The avant-garde and its journals 3. (Budapest, 2017)
Gábor Dobó: Generation Change, Synthesis and a Programme for a New Society - Dokumentum in Budapest (1926-1927)
Gábor Dobó GENERATION CHANGE, SYNTHESIS AND A PROGRAMME FOR A NEW SOCIETY - DOKUMENTUM IN BUDAPEST (1926-1927) Carrying the slogan “reporting on art and society", the journal Dokumentum [Document] was concerned with the interrelationships of culture, politics and society. It was published in Budapest, and ran for only five issues. Its founders - the editor-in-chief, Lajos Kassák, together with Tibor Déry, Andor Németh, Gyula Illyés and József Nádass - had all returned to Hungary in 1926, having departed after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. In their years of exile, they had worked in the international avant-garde movements, while always keeping track of Hungarian cultural and political affairs. Dokumentum set out to do what the important literary review of Hungarian modernism launched in 1908, Nyugat [West] had done twenty years previously - to be the journal of the young generation of artists (“fiatalok" - the “young ones”), seeking answers to contemporary questions beyond the reach of the “efficiently ran” but in their view “senescent" journals.2 Dokumentum, with its interest in contemporary culture in the broadest possible sense, had a distinctive place in the culture of European avant-garde journals that flourished after the First World War. Looking to extend its reader- ship abroad, it published some of its articles in German and French as well as in Hungarian. Publication of writing translated from world languages into the national language and vice versa was rare in the Hungarian journal market at the time, but an established practice in European avant-garde journals, enabling them to function as vehicles of multi-directional cultural transfer.3 [Fig. 1] In line with foreign journals of similar philosophy, Dokumentum proclaimed the interaction of science, technology, sociology, popular culture and the arts. At the time of writing, the author was in receipt of a grant from the Deák Dénes Foundation and the New National Excellence Programme of the ä Ministry of Human Resources, code number ÚNKP-17-3 1 For more detail see, Éva Forgács-Tyrus Miller, The Avant-Garde in Budapest and in Exile in Vienna, in Peter Brooker-Sascha Bru-Andrew Thacker-Christian Weikop (eds.), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. III., Europe 1880-1940, Oxford UP, Oxford-New York, 2013,1128-1156. 2 Letter from Lajos Kassák to Jolán Simon, Vienna, [1925]. KM-lev. 2031/20. Petőfi Literary Mu- seum-Kassák Museum, Budapest. 3 See Eszter Balázs, Kulturális transzferek a történeti kutatásban, Beszélgetés Michael Wer- nerrel, a párizsi Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) tanárával [Cultural transfers in historical research, Interview with Michael Werner, professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris], Aetas, 19/3-4., 2004,245-253. 209
